Sometimes I am acutely aware of my own evolution: I used to be so much younger than I am. There are moments when I seem to look up and realize, oh, that’s why my mom got so angry when we left our dishes on the table. Washing dishes over and over is plain annoying, as is sweeping, and laundry, and all the little acts of maintenance that somehow combine to equal a nice, adult life. I find myself in a constant battle against entropy, forever putting something away. And then all of a sudden I glance into the mirror, push my curling hair behind my ears, and somehow I see my mother there, there, staring back at me.
In my skin I see my mother's skin. My feet have become her feet, my fingernails like her tight ovals, elbows rough and cheekbones arching beneath soft skin. I use her diminutives and her inflection. I can hear her voice echoed when I speak. I’ve avoided her spiraling frenzies under stress, though I’ve been known to cry out of frustration and like any good mammal I lash out when cornered. I think I manage to sidestep her tendency to repeat an instruction ad nauseam, though I’ve never yet had to get three kids out the door before eight every morning. I think I have some of her dignity; I hope I do. Some of her inner dexterity, her ability to fill all the roles required of her without losing herself. Some of her exceptional love, the gently fierce pride and tenderness.
And beneath that, I can see my grandmother's hands in mine as I type, the straight-backed integrity inside her hunched and trembling figure. I remember winter mornings with steaming mugs of hot chocolate and oversugared grapefruit, taking the crusts from my bread outside to feed to her carefully guarded horde of birds. She leaned over my shoulder as we watched them industrious in the garden, pointing out doves and finches. Even when surgery and illness rendered her housebound, she insisted on tending to her own sprawling rosebushes. She has just made perhaps her first significant surrender to age: she no longer drives, but calls my mother with long grocery lists. When news came of the death of what had been her last remaining friend, I called to offer my condolences. She deflected the conversation after only a moment, telling me to always be happy, never give up your joy.
My eyes are said to be my grandfathers', the same deep greyblue passing down from both my mother's and my father's fathers, skipping my parents to shine from my eyes, and my brother's. My father tells me that in mind also I am like the grandfather whom I alone of my siblings remember. His books on philosophy and psychology and politics sit on my bookshelf, his scribbled notes in the margins. My father himself gave me his expressive eyebrows and an enduring interest in the intricacies of the world.
I wonder to myself what my children will receive from me; I wonder if I will have children. Any time I picture try to them they end up with curly hair, and they like to eat dirt. Perhaps I’m just extrapolating from pictures of myself as a kid. Perhaps I’m just hoping that one day I’ll have something – a love, a life, a marriage maybe, organs at least that do what they’re supposed to – that will allow me to add more good people to the world.
Of course, to get to that place in my head where I coo and scoff at my mud-faced kid, I’d at least theoretically have to find somebody willing to have a baby with me. And it seems like, while I’m prodigious (and maybe prodigal, too, now that I think about it) at falling madly in love, I have a hard time with the maintenance.
What I really love, and perhaps what I love most, is the gut-wrenching, spine-spiraling, teeth-buzzing almost-terror of it, the high singing tension, the clubfooted dance, our awkward pauses, the moment before nervous laughter. The electricity in my veins the first time he touches my wrist; the thick air that writhes and twists between our met eyes. Once the kiss and sex and the rest of it comes about, some of that fire is lost. Maybe that’s why I fall in love over and over, just for that initial taut, waiting feeling, so bursting full of potential, possibility, thrilling with expectation. Like the afternoon before a good thunderstorm, everything crackling with energy. In some ways I think that might be what I live for: it is a way to be unequivocally alive.
Also, there is the fact that that the middle path is, for me at least, by far the most difficult to tread. How easy to fling yourself into excess, in love and in all things. Eat the whole pizza, drink the whole bottle, quit the job, move across country. Or else stick to austere and dull asceticism, and fast, sleep all day, put up with things because it takes too much effort to change them. In between is the challenge, the supreme difficulty of eating just one cookie, or trying to change the system from within. Spend the night with him without having sex; have a good time without falling in love. I am by far more likely to shave my head than bother with keeping my bangs out of my eyes. Moderation and I do not find that we have much in common, and we tend to go our separate ways.
But the middle path is clearly the most stable, and stability is a good thing to have. I would like to learn how to love someone just a little bit, just enough to make things worthwhile, but not so much that the whole of my being is invested into it, not so much that I am open to heartbreak at every moment. I would like to learn how to be happy with someone without my happiness becoming dependant on them; I would like to learn how to make chocolate-chip cookies without eating all the batter before it even gets on the tray.
In the meantime, I can take comfort in the fact that, at least, I’m not wishy-washy. At least, my life is exciting. Drama is easily mistaken for depth, in the right light.
And maybe one day, when I get my impulses and my fat looming fears under control, I’ll discover all the right circumstances and produce some of those children who I picture scrambling after earthworms when it rains. I see them behind me in a vegetable garden, eating green beans off the vines, squealing when they discover a spider or a frog. And they will have my eyes, my abhorrent lack of coordination, my need to understand. They will fold laundry the way my mother taught me to fold laundry, will perhaps be brilliant and inherit their grandfather’s love of molecules, and call me one day from college to talk about their electrophoresis lab. They might be born with Down’s syndrome and never understand that our bodies – the entire of the bright and beautiful world – is made up of little squirming cells, dividing, dividing, dividing forever. For god has no fear of inequity; or maybe just a knowledge of parity larger enough than ours that we can’t see it. I was born whole and healthy, all my chromosomes in line. There would be some justice in giving me a child that isn’t; not punishment, just one more thing that happens in life.
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